Talk Amongst Yourselves

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I beat Shovel Knight! More than any other game, I could really see how much my skills improved over the 10 hours of game time I put into it. I'm still almost on track to reach my goal of finishing 25 games this year (that was game number 13).

Hello all. I'm in Utah for work. :) So far I've been to an MLS match (Real Salt Lake vs Colorado Rapids) that had an hour delay in the middle when a lightning storm came through, and did 100km on the road bike today checking out the area I'm staying.

I picked it up again last week (haven't played since PoE)... finished the new quest and picked up where I'd left off - trying to get Octaiva's neuroptics to drop. Broke up the repetition farming other things - put together Chroma, Hydroid, Nekros and my first amp between ODS runs - but finally got the neuroptics to drop, and now I realise I have nowhere near enough resources to actually build it...

It's Warframe's quests that always pull me back to the game - the lore is just so good, I just love the Lovecraftian themes (something that drew me into Destiny 1 as well, but has been entirely absent from D2, at least until the recent Whisper quest). The promise of new frames being just a few missions away keeps me playing for a few weeks or a month... Then the grind gets too much, and I stop playing until the next quest gets released.

Had a root canal done yesterday after a week of an infected tooth, gum and nerve. I am SO relieved. I can finally do things again. It's costing an arm and a leg, but I would much rather this than being in pain all that time.

Had a chuckle to myself when going over to work this morning, the shopping centre we're in is getting re-painted & a local company who have been around for yonks got the contract, and they were out the front this morning prepping one part to be painted & I look up and the singer of Lagerstein was on the roof. It makes sense since it's his family's company who got the job, but at the same time I find it amusing because I am a fan of the band, and from memory I went to school with him & their current bass player, and they both also work at my mates bar just in town. It's such a small world.

Thanks to tax return time I might be grabbing a PS4 Pro to replace my launch model PS4, which is on the brink of death. I'm looking into games which would show off the new console's capabilities but I also want something fun.

I'm interested in Horizon Zero Dawn but I'm also a little fatigued on big open world RPGs after finishing Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 not too long ago. Do you guys think it's worth trying out? Is it hard? I finished Witcher 3 and Hearts of Stone but that's like the limit of my skill, more than that and I just get frustrated.

(Seriously, I have no idea how people play that game on Death March difficulty and say it's not that hard... )

HZD is definitely a great game to play, I would say because of gameplay/combat and the visuals. But it is another open world RPG pretty much in the same vain as any other, so would recommend coming in fresh if you have burn out. A playthrough is prolly 40-50hrs.

No, not difficult, in the same way of most AAA title open world games. You just need to recognize when you haven't upgraded enough to take on the harder robot dinosaurs, which you can run into during the middle stages of this game but can be avoided and returned to later. The only other potentially "difficult" parts are the cauldrons, which are especially like tombs, a number of underground stages that are played in a closed space and therefore you can get caught in defenseless situations taking too much damage.

HZD is a strange one. Its a brilliant product, and should be in your collection, so that should be the takeaway from this. but if you compare it to Witcher 3 or Fallout 4, it does things differently to them.

If you think of those two games, theres a lot of 'stuff' to do, but most of it is meaningless time filler, particularly with Skyrim. Some of that filler is better than others. HZD culls that and really only gives relevant content. You don't have missions appearing every 2 minutes, but the ones you do have feel more relevant because of that.

Then you have content that feels more like an achievement than a mission, and HZD does those very well. Clear out bandit camps, control tallnecks, do a dungeon run to learn new skills, that sort of thing. All are essentially quests, but don't feel like it.

Where it shines though is how it eeks out the backstory. Witcher 3 you knew fairly early on where things were headed, and Fallout 4 took way too long to get to the real story. This is real nicely in the middle. You find parts out at a great pace, and the story itself is genuinely good.

Its a game that any PS4 gamer that likes action adventure games really should own. Pretty much for the same reasons Fallout 4 Skyrim, Witcher 3, and Uncharted are always recommended. If you're going in blind, the story will give more than a few surprises.

Thanks for the detailed comment! I appreciate the description and comparison to other open world games and honestly, I think your description and praise for HZD have helped me to finalise my choice to buy the damn thing.

So there's bugger all I can say about this ... because I found out about it yesterday pretty much when everyone else did. So as a completely personal opinion and not representative of anything or any knowledge: I wouldn't expect any changes; subsidiaries tend to be left to do their own thing.

Ha. I recently took advantage of Big W & their toy sale, I lay-byed a PS4 Pro & an Xbox One X so I have 6 months to pay off both which is only $25 a week after staff discount. But I decided to throw my launch model PS4 up on eBay & within 30 minutes I had sold it for my asking price, which was what you'd be paying at EB Games for a pre-owned one with the game I included.

I checked out the persons profile who bought it & they appear to re-sell PlayStation stuff, all I could think was "Good luck re-selling this & making a profit..." I even made money on the postage, so it's a win-win for me!

So ive spent the day receiving other people's text messages and phone calls. For some reason someone elses phone number is going to me. I amswered asked who they were all calling and it's not my number.
I ring optus to enquire and get told no that's impossible every single person has been putting in the wrong number.
Messages seem to also go through to the intended person because there are conversations happening.
What a time to be an Optus customer.

This is for @zombiejesus and other techies here. And yes, this is another one of those questions that are likely to get me laughed out of here.

When it comes to swap files (especially on Windows), I've always grown up with the rule that (a) if one can accomodate the space, it should be twice the physical RAM size, or (b) be the same as the physical RAM if space is tight.

Now I do my work on a virtual machine that sits on a mechanical RAID-1 and I game on a PC with a M2 SSD.

Despite both actually having 16 GB of RAM, Windows automatically configured each to have (respectively) 3 GB and 4 GB.

And that's the maximum size it allows - it can be smaller.

I'm just asking, is the old medicine I grew up with still applicable? Or is Windows really messing up my swap size?

You don't really need to tweak the page file any more like in earlier generations of Windows, leaving it to automatic management is just fine. The only reason you'd need page to match or exceed physical memory is if you want a full memory dump on a crash, but otherwise 3-4GB is perfectly fine. With 16GB RAM you're barely even going to touch that page file, but Windows needs it regardless for emergencies and memory dumps.

Even performance-wise, the only thing that makes any difference is just setting the page file to a fixed size rather than dynamic. Odds are Windows won't resize it at all when you have 16GB of physical, but it doesn't hurt to set it fixed anyway.

OK so PAX meat. Scree has done the heavy lifting on this is the past but now is time to get stuff organised. Backlot has been great but not sure on numbers this year. From what I can tell Techie has been carrying the can on costs so doing that might cost a bit more

So I think first things first, who is coming to PAX and/or who wants to come to Pax meat. I'll setup a group to chat. Also happy to take suggestions on what we want we could do, etc...

There you go! Blizzard sent out the keys; I mentioned in the post originally that it was going to be a bit impractical to do a shout-out for 500 people all at once (just going through all the emails and sorting out the spam was ... it was a time).

Sorry you didn't get pinged earlier though, I could have probably done a short blip or something so people knew. But I understand all the emails went out, so hopefully people got enough time with the beta.

On a similar note, I recall that there's a game out there, I think it's one of the Skate games, that you simply can't play anymore. The physical copy had nothing on it - you stuck it in your console and downloaded the whole thing, but the servers aren't up. The game just doesn't exist.
Such is the fate of all games that choose this practice.

In the wake of community and political pressure following the livestreaming of the horrific terrorist attacks at Christchurch on Friday, Australian ISPs have started blocking some sites used to rehost footage of the livestream, including the infamous 8chan image board.